New Mac Pro now supports Windows 8 and up only via Boot Camp

For years, Mac users that also need to be able to access software that only runs on Windows machines have been able to use Boot Camp to make that happen. Boot Camp is a dual boot environment that allows the installation of Windows OS on Mac computers. Apple has made a change to Boot Camp that might affect users on the new Mac Pro computer.

The new Mac Pro that launched late last year will only support Windows 8 or later on its Boot Camp partition. There is no longer an option to install Windows 7 on the machine. The change for new Mac Pro users is believed to herald a change for future versions of Boot Camp eliminating support for anything but Windows 8 and up on all Apple devices.

For now, the new Mac Pro is the only Boot Camp device that doesn't support Windows 7. Devices running Boot Camp 5.x still support Windows 7 and later OS. Boot Camp 4.x on older Mac machines supports Windows XP and Windows 7.

It's unclear if the older versions of Boot Camp will be updated eliminating support for older versions of Windows. This news won't affect many Mac Pro users, but those that want to run Windows 7 won't be happy that they need to upgrade Windows. Check out our Mac Pro 2013 review for more details on the latest version of the Mac Pro.

SOURCE: MacWindows